The Old New Thing

November 2006 - Page 3 of 3 - The Old New Thing

Aspiring to the wrong office on election day

November 7, 2006 Nov 7, 2006 11/7/06
Raymond Chen
Many years ago, the local public radio station invited the three candidates for Seattle Port Commissioner to take part in a program on the upcoming election. Each candidate was given some time to address the voters directly. Here's how it went, roughly. Candidate 1: "We need an experienced person to find solutions for our region's ...

There's going to be an awful lot more overclocking out there

November 7, 2006 Nov 7, 2006 11/7/06
Raymond Chen
Last year, I told the story of overclocking being the source of a lot of mysterious crashes and that some of those overclocked machines were overclocked at the store. These machines came from small, independent shops rather than the major manufacturers. Well it looks like that's about to change. Gateway's FX530 Desktop can be ordered ...

Tonya and Nancy: The Opera

November 6, 2006 Nov 6, 2006 11/6/06
Raymond Chen
No, really, it's not a joke. There really is an opera written about Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. And Only a Game is there. The work was composed as a master's thesis at Tufts University by Abigail Al-Doory and, as is the nature of said productions, it was performed exactly twice and then packed away. Abigail Al-Doory: We've got our ...

On the importance of backwards compatibility for large corporations

November 6, 2006 Nov 6, 2006 11/6/06
Raymond Chen
Representatives from the IT department of a major worldwide corporation came to Redmond and took time out of their busy schedule to give a talk on how their operations are set up. I was phenomenally impressed. These people know their stuff. Definitely a world-class operation. One of the tidbits of information they shared with us is some ...

How do I convert an HRESULT to a Win32 error code?

November 3, 2006 Nov 3, 2006 11/3/06
Raymond Chen
Everybody knows that you can use the macro to convert a Win32 error code to an , but how do you do the reverse? Let's look at the definition of : If the value is less than or equal to zero, then the macro returns the value unchanged. Otherwise, it takes the lower sixteen bits and combines them with and . How do you reverse this ...

Make sure you disable the correct window for modal UI

November 2, 2006 Nov 2, 2006 11/2/06
Raymond Chen
Some time ago, I was asked to look at two independent problems with people trying to do modal UI manually. Well, actually, when the issues were presented to me, they weren't described in quite that way. They were more along the lines of, "Something strange is happening in our UI. Can you help?" Only in the discussion of the scenarios did it ...

I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature

November 1, 2006 Nov 1, 2006 11/1/06
Raymond Chen
I often find myself saying, "I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature." "That feature" is something aggressively user-hostile, like forcing a shortcut into the Quick Launch bar or the Favorites menu, like automatically turning on a taskbar toolbar, like adding an icon to the notification area that conveys no useful information...